Where to begin
New to Catholicism?
Why?
The Church exists because it believes something happened: that God came among us as a man, was killed, and rose — and that this is good news for everyone. The Gospel has him calling the people around him friends, and that is what is held out: to be loved by name, to trust someone worth trusting, and for neither to end at death. It is not a bargain, or a rule kept, or a distance properly observed. Everything the Church does follows from wanting that to reach you. It calls itself “a sign and instrument” of union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.†
What is “catholic”?
It is a Greek word, not a brand: katholikos, according to the whole. It means that nothing of the faith has been quietly dropped, and that nobody has been left out. Whoever you are and wherever you are from, it means the invitation was written with you in it.†
What is the Church?
Up close it looks ordinary: a parish, a priest running late, a roof that needs mending. It also calls itself the Body of Christ, and it will not let anyone keep one of those and drop the other — the visible society and the mystical Body are “not to be considered as two realities”, the Council says, but “one complex reality”. The ordinary part is not the packaging. It is how the rest reaches anybody at all.†
How old?
About two thousand years. It began in Jerusalem with a small company of people who said they had seen him alive, and its bishops stand in a line it traces back to them, with the bishop of Rome in Peter’s place. Since then: twenty-one councils, two great divisions, and saints in every century.†
How large?
1.4 billion people, nearly a fifth of everyone alive: almost half of them in the Americas, a fifth in Europe, and a fifth in Africa, where the number is growing fastest.
Where to begin?
Begin with the Compendium of the Catechism: the same teaching as the Catechism, written as questions and answers. It is about a tenth the length and assumes little.
Never read the Bible?
It is not one book but seventy-three, written over more than a thousand years and bound in the order the Church settled on — not the order events happened in, and not the order that is easiest to read. Most people start at the first page and stop a few weeks later, in a long chapter of ancient law, because nothing has yet told them what it is for.
Start with a Gospel
Four short books tell the life of Jesus. They sit past the middle of the Bible rather than at the front, which is why most people who start at page one never reach them. Begin there instead. The Second Vatican Council asked that the faithful be taught the right use of Scripture, “especially the New Testament and above all the Gospels”.†
There is a case for opening each of them first. Pick whichever reason sounds like yours.
- Matthew Has the Sermon on the Mount at its center — the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, most of what people quote without knowing where it comes from. The Church placed it first of the four.
- Mark The shortest. You can read the whole thing in an afternoon, and having finished one is worth more at the start than having chosen the best one.
- Luke Written for a man who had already been taught about Jesus, and set down in order so that he could be sure of what he had been told. It runs straight on into the Acts of the Apostles, so it is really the first half of a longer book.
- John The one that says outright why it was written: “that you may believe”. It goes straight at the question of who Jesus is.
Then read what happened next
When you have finished one, read what the people who knew him did after he left them.
Then the older half
Not from the first page, and not all of it. A few places carry the story, and they are the ones the Gospels keep pointing back to.
- Genesis 1–11 How it begins, and how it goes wrong.
- Genesis 12–50 One family, and a promise made to it that outlives everyone in it.
- Exodus 1–20 A people brought out of slavery, and given a law to live by.
- Psalms Not a story: a hundred and fifty prayers and songs. Read one at a time, in any order. The Church still prays these every day.
You will recognize things, and that is the point rather than a coincidence. The Church reads the older books in the light of Christ and the newer ones in the light of what came before — each half explains the other, which is why neither is read alone.†
